MinPeak: An Intelligent Scheduler for Non-Preemptive Appliances in Smart Grid

摘要

Minimizing peak load consumption has been one of the primary objectives behind most of the research work conducted on demand side management in smart grid domain. Demand side management uses different techniques to curtail consumers' load consumption during peak-hour periods and tries to schedule various deferrable appliances to operate during off-peak hours. In this paper, we propose MinPeak algorithm to schedule deferrable appliances with the objective of reducing peak load demand. The problem is solved as a strip-packing problem, where all the appliances, characterized by their power consumption and execution time units, are packed or scheduled within a certain scheduling time horizon or width of a strip. We have conducted a comprehensive simulation study using existing benchmark data sets and compared the proposed algorithm with some of the well known heuristics for strip packing problem. The results are very encouraging in terms of reducing peak load demand and overall efficiency of the system.